The Grammy Awards changed the name of its Best World Music Album category to Best Global Music Album, as reported Billboard.
The report stated that the Recording Academy announced the name change on Monday, just 22 days prior to the announcement of the 63rd annual Grammy nominations.
The Billboard report mentioned that the announcement was made through a statement which read: “As we continue to embrace a truly global mindset, we update our language to reflect a more appropriate categorization that seeks to engage and celebrate the current scope of music from around the world. Over the summer we held discussions with artists, ethnomusicologists, and linguists from around the world who determined that there was an opportunity to update the best world music album category toward a more relevant, modern, and inclusive term…The change symbolizes a departure from the connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American’ that the former term embodied while adapting to current listening trends and cultural evolution among the diverse communities it may represent.”
In June, the Grammys decided to drop the word ‘urban’ from its awards.
This resulted in the Best Urban Contemporary Album category to be renamed as the Best Progressive R&B Album.
The new category is described on the website as: “This category recognizes excellence in albums of world music, including recordings of international non-Western classical music, international non-American and non-British traditional folk music, international cross-cultural music based on the previously mentioned genres as well as international recordings of world beat, world jazz (with a higher percentage of world than jazz music), world pop and cross-cultural music. Albums of reggae, Latin or European pop music aren’t eligible in this category and should be entered in other categories as appropriate.”
Recommended
The announcement from the Grammys comes at a time when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, popularly known as the Oscars, recently changed the name of their Best Foreign Language Film category to Best International Feature Film.
The 63rd Grammy Awards will take place on January 31, 2021, to recognise excellence in music released in late 2019 and 2020.
Chair and interim recording academy President/CEO Harvey Mason Jr will be joined by past Grammy winners, nominees, and hopefuls from remote locations across the country as he reveals the nominees for all 84 categories, according the website.